The Five Chords Of Your Music Project

If you want to be a successful music entrepreneur you’ll need to learn to manage your project correctly. So, let’s start by talking about music business management and systems.

A system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole. You are a system, and I’m a system. The galaxy is a system, and your music project is a system. Systems within systems, all connected and affecting each other.

You know what else a system is? A song. So we could say that if your vision about your music project is a song in your head: your business is the song being played. It’s a song meant to serve you and your audience, but if you don’t do things correctly, you’ll end up a slave to your project and your clients instead. Or even worse: hating the work you do. Your project needs to empower you to live the life of your dreams; otherwise, it will ultimately fail.

However, because it’s a song of your own, it’s completely affected by your feelings and actions, especially during its infancy. This is why for your music project to reach maturity and become profitable you’ll need to change; you’ll need to become a music entrepreneur by looking at the whole picture and improving every living part of it. The same way you would compose a song until your satisfaction and that of your audience.

The primary systems (or chords as I like to call them) of your project are Soul, Brand, Reach, Production and Management. All these areas are intertwined to bring your music project to life. They’re the five chords of your music business management; if one of these areas fail, your project will suffer and you with it.

Let’s take a closer look at each one of them

Soul

How is your project going to help you? Whose lives are your music project going to enrich? What’s the exact shape of your project? These are some of the questions you need to answer yourself to give your project a worthy soul and improve its chances of success.

Brand

Your project’s brand is the embodiment of your project’s soul. It needs to communicate with your ideal audience. Moreover, forget about comparing your brand with other musicians or music projects. The world doesn’t need another Hendrix or Napster; it needs something new. If you’re feeling very comfortable with your brand, it means you’re doing what everyone else is doing.

Reach

You do a disservice to your art, your expertise and the world when you don’t promote your brand the right way. Marketing and sales are about your brand communicating your vision, mission and unique value offer as correctly as possible to reach the audience that will get the most value out of it.

Production

If you don’t offer value to your clients your business has its days counted, and it won’t matter how many people you reach, they’ll take care of telling the world how crappy your product or service is. So, a good brand and reach can only be achieved by listening to yourself and your clients and working very hard on improving your value offer. You’ll know if you’re offering great value, your audience will tell you.

Management

You need to properly balance all of the other chords so you can have a profitable music project and the life quality you deserve. This should be your primary goal as a business owner.

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So how do you improve these areas?

You need to work in them with the eyes of an artist and a scientist. You need to remove everything that’s wrong with your music business management until you reach consistent results, for yourself ( meaning your salary and peace of mind ), for your music business and your audience. The only way to do that effectively is by innovating and quantifying your results. Yep, management isn’t the only chord that requires your project to work with numbers. A music entrepreneur needs to understand the numbers of his project.

In an ideal world, every single one of your system would go through this project of creation and quantification. When you find tasks that work you need to take good care of documenting them into an operation manual, so when the time is right, and you need to hire help to do it, your team knows exactly what has to be done, and your project can keep growing.

Our Roadmapping Plans and Business Consulting

All these inner aspects of your business, from market segment selection to offer ladder design are covered by our Roadmapping services. They’re designed to be accessible services, so even if you don’t have the budget to hire a professional to build your brand you still can benefit from a Roadmap that guides you through the best way to achieve it.

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About Ivan Duch

Iván is a long-time musician and entrepreneur. Nowadays he merges his knowledge of attraction techniques, marketing and his passion for music to craft impactful online presences for the music industry.